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Recovery

April 18, 2011

MY CELL PHONE BUZZED: “HAVE YOU HEARD FROM____?” I’ve learned through experience to be wary of text messages from people I don’t know asking for my friend’s whereabouts. So after making a quick mental checklist of the possibilities – someone looking for money? someone looking for a fight? a social worker? collection agency? – I texted back circumspectly: “Yes. Who’s this?”

“I know him from the homeless shelter. He’s a friend.” Then, seconds later, “Do you know where he’s headed?”

I didn’t have time for this. I’d just come off the train at Grand Central Station, and needed to squeeze through the rush-hour crowd and get a downtown subway to a lecture by a renowned spiritual teacher.

“Dunno,” I replied, still skeptical. “He didn’t say.” That was true. I had seen my friend the day before, to give him some things I’d been keeping for him. But he didn’t say where he was going. My guess is he didn’t know himself. “He wasn’t too communicative,” I added.

The next day, my friend resurfaced. I asked him about the texts. “Oh, yeah, that’s xxxx,” he said. “He’s been a good friend.” I changed the phone number on the texts to a name, and sent an update. “Good to hear,” xxxx replied. “Hopefully he will be good. Thanks for letting me know.”

Years of keeping company with people on both sides of alcoholism and addiction – the sufferers and the friends and family trying to detach with love – have created a reflex in me to go to dark places when I’m on unfamiliar ground. But reality is more than darkness. And that should not surprise me.

In Liberation Theology, people talk about the lessons that can be learned from those on society’s margins. The marginalized “can help cultivate a new look at the way things are.” If we learn anew “how to listen,” we can gain insights “in places where we least expect it” (Joerg Rieger, Remember the Poor).

I sort of got it intellectually when I read it in seminary. But, to really get it, I had to have real-life lab practice – like seeing again last week that that friendships exist, too, among the homeless, maybe especially so. I needed to experience that a lesson can come in unexpected places, at unexpected times – including on the way to what I think is my lesson. As a friend says, “If you want to hear God laugh, make plans.”

The surprise of insight in places we least expect it came through in my reading this week, too. On the recommendation of my friend (who found solace in it during a recent stay in a drug-treatment program), I bought Grand Central Winter, Lee Stringer’s 1998 memoir of the decade he spent living on the streets of New York addicted to crack cocaine.

In some ways, the book confirmed my worst fears. Life on the streets can be predatory. There's what the author calls "the pocket incident": two men carefully cut into the pants pocket of a sleeping homeless man and make off with a wad of cash. Guys routinely con each other and the system – and assume the system does the same to them. “It’s all a hustle,” advises one of the author’s acquaintances. What outsiders think will be havens, like the homeless shelters, turn out to be riven with a “watch-your-back, watch-your-mouth, watch-out-for-number-one, jailhouse mentality.”

But it’s not all darkness. There’s a moral thread that runs through Grand Central Winter. Guys keep an eye on each other. It’s rare for someone to get lost on the streets; the homeless generally know where each other are. There's humor. There’s creativity; for a while, a group of guys keeps a large population fed on the food thrown out by the train crews because it’s passed its sell-by date. There are charitable impulses, like when Stringer tries to give a passerby a copy of Street News, the newspaper for the New York’s homeless, arguing “If I couldn’t give something to someone every now and then, wouldn’t that make me even poorer than I am?”

Most important, there’s hope. The author eventually puts down his crack pipe and goes into recovery. It’s not a clean break. He has near-misses, then relapses, leading to an epiphany, on his knees, praying for help on Dog Run Hill in Central Park, and receiving it in the form of a seemingly heaven-sent dog that dashes up the hill...sits down...and leans into him. "I break out in goosebumps," he writes. "From that second...I never, ever had another craving."

Stringer remarks that he does not know any “hardworking, moral, churchgoing, non-addicted American who would go to the lengths to which recovering addicts and alcoholics go for the sake of spiritual growth." He repeats the oft-heard wisdom in the rooms that “religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.”

On the other side of that hell, he finds that the “miraculous world” that he believed in as a child, then through “grinding disappointment” had given up on, is still present. It’s in the joy he rediscovers in his travels through the city, coming up out of the subway, seeing the day with new eyes. Most, though, it’s in the people whose stories he hears – “people who’d stopped kidding themselves” and now “took solace in revealing their weakness and pain.”

“I doubt if people are ever so profoundly attractive as when they are being honest about themselves,” he writes. “…Damned if it isn’t a miraculous world after all.”

That’s I.T.

For more on Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter, or to buy a copy, click here.

March 21, 2011

EVERY COUPLE SUNDAYS, I DRIVE TO QUEENS to visit someone close to me who’s in a long-term drug-treatment program. It’s the latest stop in a downward spiral that’s taken him through a half-dozen detoxes, hospitals, rehabs, and shelters in New York City in the past nine months and, over the past 12 years, on a labyrinthine journey across the country for a cure that so far has proved elusive.

But we don’t talk about the past. Maybe an expression of gratitude for the nurse in Westchester who gave him $40 to get to a hospital, and said "just pay it forward.” Or the woman who came across him in the street in Manhattan and called 911 to get him an ambulance; the guys in the shelter who kept an eye out for him; the nurse’s assistant who prayed at his bedside; the psychiatrist who offered to see him essentially for free when he’s ready; the cops, ambulance crews, social workers, and others who treated him with dignity when they didn’t have to.

Or maybe the waitress who looked past the wear-and-tear signs of homelessness in his appearance one morning last fall when I took him out for breakfast – the grungy clothes, the urban grit on his hands – and greeted us with a cheery “what’ll you have, boys?” (Question to ponder: Does the Buddha wear a waitress’ uniform?)

Mostly, for the hour or two that we have together, we just sit with each other. Not focus on the past. Or project into the future. Instead talk about the present – how we’re doing, what we’re reading, what our day has been like.

I’m not sure this is what Sharon Salzberg, the Buddhist author and teacher, had in mind in her lecture on mindfulness at Tibet House in Manhattan last week. But what she said seemed familiar: Mindfulness means opening fully to the moment. We need to learn to let go of clinging to things we love (as if holding on hard enough will keep them from ever going away); sit with pain rather than push it away; not go to sleep or numb out on distractions when life bores us. Not fall into traps like thinking “it’s never going to get better.”

Instead we are to engage in a balanced way with whatever life brings. “Learn the ‘letting-go’ muscle,” she said. When we slip, which, as in meditation, inevitably happens, “begin again.”

Investing in the here-and-now fully (it’s not mindhalffullness) seems to be in the core of many spiritual traditions. It’s the essence of one of my favorite 12-step slogans (actually, one my friend turned me onto): “Look down at your feet.” Where we are is where we’re supposed to be. The most important lessons for us are not out there in the future, or over there where the cool people are. They’re right in front of us, in the quotidian rhythms of life – children, spouses, parents, friends, work, colleagues, the person in front of us in line at the bank. They can especially be in the places we never seek out – doctors’ offices, unemployment, visiting days at rehabs.

In seminary, I’ve learned that some of the deepest, most healing changes occur in the unexpected places. The road. By a well. A cave. Hardship.

“Even in the midst of great pain, Lord,

I praise you for that which is.

…I pray for whatever you send me,

And I ask to receive it as your gift.”

- Psalm IV, translated by the poet Stephen Mitchell

I’m not by nature a transcendence-seeker. I agree with the singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who wrote that he spent most of his life “avoiding transcendence” for the simple reason that “the shit hurts.” These kinds of experience ask us to change. Go to new places. Leave the comfortable. Let down our guard.

I flinch a bit when I hear people say they’re thankful for their troubles because of how much they’ve grown spiritually. “Hey, take mine," I think. "You’ll grow even more.” But they have a point. The kindness my friend found in the group of guys he met in the homeless shelter changed me – how they looked out for each other so they wouldn’t get into trouble; bought each other slices of pizza when they came into a little money; swapped tips on negotiating the social services departments, getting a library card, finding hot meals at churches. I can’t walk by a homeless person now without offering a silent prayer.

Others’ generosity, too. When a local cop was critically injured in a car accident on duty, I gave blood, wrote get-well cards, made donations, prayed. Experience has bonded me to an ever-widening community. The world has become sweeter, more precious, more of an adventure – when I remember to keep my eyes open.

Life is a package deal. We don’t get a menu (“Yes, I’d like Pleasure, with a side of Pleasure. Dessert? No Pain.”). And, as Salzberg says, life can “turn on a dime.” The next moment could bring a natural disaster. Or a full ride to graduate school. A dreaded diagnosis. Or true love.

Or we could be like the woman I fell into a conversation with on the train home the night of the lecture (funny how life can put a coda on what we’ve just heard). Fifteen years ago, during a snowstorm, she decided to check in on a new neighbor and found, to her dismay, there was little she could do. The neighbor was deaf; they couldn’t communicate. She resolved to take a sign language class so she could talk with the neighbor. That led to another class. And another. Now she’s in graduate school to become a counselor to the deaf. All because of snow.

I used to think the beatifically smiling Buddhas my kids have bought me were beaming because they’d risen above the world. Now I see that they smile because they're connected to everyone. And everything. And, within this torn world, find joy.

Psalm IV

Even in the midst of great pain, Lord,

I praise you for that which is.

I will not refuse this grief

or close myself to this anguish.

Let shallow men pray for comfort:

“Comfort us; shield us from sorrow.”

I pray for whatever you send me,

and I ask to receive it as your gift.

You have put a joy in my heart

greater than the world’s riches.

I lie down trusting the darkness

for I know that even now you are here.

– translation by Stephen Mitchell

That’s I.T.

Sharon Salzberg has a new book, Real Happiness. Her series of lectures is continuing at Tibet House. She’s worth listening to (as a wise commenter inferred in response to an earlier post): down-to-earth, accessible, witty, droll, learned, laser-sharp, and an amazing storyteller. Check the Tibet House calendar.

I’ve always liked Steve Earle’s ornery take on transcendence. After trying out various definitions – “going through something” brings to mind “plate glass windows and divorces”; “rising above” problems “smacks of avoidance as well as elitism” – he settles on it meaning “being still long enough to know when it’s time to move on.” He then adds: “Fuck me.” From the cover notes of Transcendental Blues.

More and more, I value the notion that all ground we walk on can be sacred ground – no matter if it’s in as church or synagogue, in the wilds of nature, a city street, or a hospital. Last year, I wrote a post on the theme. Here’s a link to it.

January 06, 2008

MAHATMA GANDHI'S SECRETARY WAS ONCE ASKED HOW Gandhi
could
speak so profoundly, for so long, without preparation, prompting, or notes.
“What Gandhi thinks, what he feels, what he says, and what he does are all the
same,” the secretary replied. “You and I, we think one thing, feel another, say
a third, and do a fourth, so we need notes and files to keep track.”

We can’t all be Gandhi. But we can strive to be authentic –
the same person in what we think, feel, say, and do.

I was reminded of this insight when I interviewed Ellen
Baker. Ellen has multiple spiritual outlets. With her husband, James Sweeney,
and four other parishioners, she recently started a church. The congregation,
part of a movement breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church, meets every
Saturday evening in their home in suburban New York.

With James, Ellen is studying Buddhism through a three-year
program at a Buddhist monastery in upstate New York. She also is a lay associate of an
order of Catholic nuns, and has participated in Catholic ministries. She is
active in Al-Anon, the 12-step program for family and friends of alcoholics.
Ellen views her work as a bookkeeper – she has had an independent practice for
17 years – as an expression of her spirituality as well.

Her beliefs have sometimes led to confrontations. Her decision
to leave the Roman Catholic Church is one example. She once was fired from a
job after standing up for what she believed.

Listening to Ellen talk, the different aspects of her life are
reflections of one of the core truths she’s learned – to “to be honest and who
you are.”

I talked with Ellen about her spiritual pursuits, her work,
and her journey.

QUESTION: You’re starting a church. Can you tell me about it?

ELLEN BAKER: It’s a brand-new, fledgling parish, and it’s
exciting. It’s called the Church for All People. And it is. Nobody’s excluded.
Women can be ordained. Gays can get married. Those are two of the big issues we’ve
had with the Roman Catholic Church.

It’s part of the Catholic Apostolic Church in North America (CACINA),
which is a movement that started back in the 1940s with priests who left the
Roman Catholic Church and started a Vatican-free Catholic Church.

Right now we have six parishioners. The priest who started
our mother church in Brooklyn comes up on
Saturdays for the services.

"It’s called the Church for All People. And it is. Nobody’s excluded.
Women can be ordained. Gays can get married."

Q: How is it exciting?

A: It’s like we’re astronauts going to visit another
planet. If you’re a Catholic, you live your life so locked into tradition. Giving
it up is like giving up my citizenship. But at the same time, my heart hasn’t
been fully in it.

Both James and I were out of the church for decades. When we
returned, there were always questions in the back of our minds. The Catholic
Church’s sex scandal put it over the edge. It was a struggle every time we went
to church. We felt like we were wearing two faces. We loved the people and
loved our ministries. But when it came to the priests and the hierarchy of the
church, we felt like hypocrites. We went through a lot of struggle and
discernment, and finally decided we couldn’t do it anymore.

Q: How is the new church different?

A: The laity are involved in all the decisions. We
decide the prayers. We take turns being the Eucharistic Minister. It’s what I
think of the Catholic Church being like in the early days, when it was a new
community, everybody was on equal footing, and services were held in people’s homes.
It feels much more natural.

“It’s what I think of the Catholic Church being like
in the early days, when it was a new community, everybody was on equal footing,
and services were held in people’s homes.”

I feel like I’m in the place where I’m supposed to be. On
Christmas morning, Joe, our priest [the Rev. Joseph Diele, a priest in the
Roman Catholic Church for two decades before starting the Church for All
People], did a special Liturgy. He asked us where we see God working in our
lives. Almost everybody touched on this new community. We didn’t know at first
what it would be about. But it’s become a big impetus for all of us. It was a
leap of faith. I feel I’m in a community that is all in this together, trusting
its instincts and moving forward.

Every morning during the week, we have a conference call. We
get on the phone at a quarter to seven, for five to ten minutes. One person
opens it with a prayer for the day. I’m absolutely amazed by what they say.
They’re beautiful prayers. Then we have petitions where we pray for specific
things, like people who are sick. Then we say the Lord’s Prayer and a short
closing. I like it a lot.

Q: What are your relationships like in your former
parish?

A: It’s been fine. A number of people feel the same
way, but can’t bring themselves to move. They have been in the church all of
their adult lives. They cling to the belief that the church is the people, and
that it’s important to stay in there and fight. I admire that. I really do. But
I’m not that kind of person. I need to get something out of this while I’m
here. I’m not here to fight for what’s going to happen in 50 years.

Q: How does the Buddhist study factor in?

A: There are so many similarities between Buddhism and
Christianity. Many times what we talked about on Saturday morning in the
Buddhism classes turns out to be what comes up that night in the Scripture
readings.

Q: Which similarities strike you most?

A: The obvious one is the message. Christ’s message is
peace, compassion, and loving your neighbor. That’s basically the Buddha’s
message, too – peace, compassion, loving-kindness, no killing, no violence. The
life of the Buddha and the life of Jesus have a lot of similarities. Many of
the stories in the sacred texts are also similar.

I had always had a theory that Jesus was the Western Buddha.
I could never buy that God would send his Son down to one small group of people
and say this is just for you and nobody else. To see this happening, 500 years
apart, on two sides of the world, makes a lot more sense to me.

A: 12-step is the umbrella over all my spirituality.
Without Al-Anon, I never would have discovered my spirituality. It’s where I
learned to have a relationship with my Higher Power, and where I learned to see
that Higher Power working in my life. It helped me learn to let go of outcomes
and “what if’s.” My other activities are, in a sense, the natural consequence
of the awakening I’ve had in Al-Anon. It made me want to connect with
like-minded people, learn more, and keep growing.

Q: Going back to when you were a kid, did you always
have a large spiritual component in your life?

A: Nothing. We were strict Roman Catholics. But it was
all about religion and nothing about spirituality. It was pray, pay, and obey:
Do the prayers they tell you to do, pay your donation every Sunday, and do
whatever they tell you. I went to Catholic school all the way, right through college.
Mass every Sunday. Confession. Sacraments. First Communion. Confirmation. But I
never really got it. I didn’t feel anything when I was in church.

“It was all about
religion and nothing about spirituality. It was pray, pay, and obey: Do the
prayers they tell you to do, pay your donation every Sunday, and do whatever
they tell you.”

Q: You wound up on Wall Street. How did that happen?

A: Really, by default. I started college at Elizabeth Seton College in Yonkers,
then transferred to Catholic University in Washington.
But I dropped out at the end of my junior year. I came back to New York and got a job
as a secretary.

My first job was for the national headquarters of the Girl
Scouts. I really liked it. I wanted to work in something that was intrinsically
good. I was a hippie, basically.
I graduated from high school in 1969. Peace,
love, justice and non-violence were definitely part of my life.

But working for a nonprofit, I wasn’t making a lot of money.
Eventually money won out, and I got a job as a secretary for a big Wall Street
firm. I worked five years at that firm, then got a job at another Wall Street
firm. I started out working for the chairman of the board. I was at the top of
the level of being a secretary.

But the whole time I was on Wall Street, I was bored with
the business. I didn’t think I could do anything but type and take shorthand. I
didn’t really understand the financial world. I was never out to make a lot of
money. Everybody around me was excited about what they were doing. I thought
there was something wrong with me. My self-esteem was so low that I felt I
couldn’t ask anybody for help. I thought they’d fire me.

Q: When you’re in that type of a hole, it’s hard to
work your way out.

A: Plus I was married to an alcoholic. I just thought
there was something wrong with me. My husband at the time was in the movie
industry, and he got a job in Hollywood.
So we picked up and relocated. I was starting to get “sick and tired of being
sick and tired,” as people say in Al-Anon. But I went. To some extent, I think
I saw it as a chance to break free of my old life and get out of the Wall
Street scene.

We lived in California 14-15 months. I started to make my own friends. I also discovered Taoism. I
started having acupuncture. My acupuncturist’s father was a Taoist master. I
started reading about Taoism. I didn’t understand any of it but there was
something about it that so wonderful and so peaceful. I didn’t know what it was,
but I knew it was something I wanted.

“I started reading about Taoism. I didn’t understand
any of it but there was something about it that so wonderful and so peaceful... I knew it was something I wanted.”

Q: What happened to change things?

A: My husband lost his job and decided to go back to New York. His addictions
were getting worse. In the back of my mind, I was starting to give up on the
marriage. I came close to saying go back without me, but I felt I couldn’t give
up that easily. We’d been married almost 10 years. I had to give it another
shot. So I went back with him.

The marriage continued to disintegrate. I got a job through
a mutual friend working for an interior designer. He was automating his office,
putting it all on computer. I could wear my jeans to work, and that really
appealed to me. (It still does!) One of the areas I had to automate was the accounting
department. I began to see how accounting worked. I realized I was good at it,
and liked it. I like everything in neat little piles and wrapped up nicely.
That’s my personality.

I went to a work for a friend of mine who was starting a
business. She asked me if I could come in a couple days a week to pay the bills
and reconcile the bank statement. That morphed into a full-time job. By then,
my husband and I had separated. I wound up doing all the
finance and administration for her business. I started going back to school,
and took accounting classes to supplement what I didn’t know.

She had a lot of freelancers working for her – designers,
writers. They really liked me. I would pay their bills the same week they would
turn them in.

I guess this is where some of the spirituality started. Most
bills we put on a 30-day rotation. But I knew these people. This was their
bread and butter. I wasn’t going to make them wait 30 days.

Q: What was spiritual about that?

A: You don’t withhold somebody’s money from them. To
me, that’s part of my spirituality. It’s the right thing to do.

“You don’t withhold somebody’s money from them. To
me, that’s part of my spirituality. It’s the right thing to do.”

Q: When did your spiritual shift began?

A: It really started when I went into Al-Anon. My
husband and I had split up and I was having a really hard time with my mother.
A couple people had suggested I go to Al-Anon. I had the classic response: “What
do I need to go for? I’m not the one who’s sick.” But they continued to suggest
it, so I went.

About the same time, I started my bookkeeping business. The
writers and designers I was working with started coming to me with their
questions about money. They’d come into my office with a 1099 and say, can you
help me out? I’d explain it, and they’d say, thank you so much for taking the
time to tell me this stuff. They started telling me, “You should hang out your own
shingle.” Things were getting bad in my job. I wasn’t happy there anymore. So I
decided to leave. They helped me. One designed my business card. One helped me
write ads to put into trade magazines. Through them, I started to get clients.

Q: Do you think there’s a connection between your
starting to go to Al-Anon and starting your own company in the same period?

A: When the student is ready, the teacher appears. When
I went to Al-Anon, the thing that first struck me was to hear people talk about
how God was working in their life. I didn’t see those things happening to me. I
was scared. I was single. My marriage was over. I was starting my own business.
I had a mortgage to pay. I had a co-op. But I was listening. I began to realize
that if things were going to change, it had to start with me. The first three
steps in 12-step programs talk about relying on God and turning your will over.
I realized I really didn’t have much choice. I had to do it.

I started praying again. But it was totally different from
when I was young. I didn’t say a Hail Mary. I basically just talked to God:
“Show me what to do here. Help me out. Am I doing the right thing?” Going back
to the rooms, week after week – I was going to three meetings a week,
consistently, for the first five years I was in program – bit by bit, I started
seeing things working in my life.

“I was scared. I was single. My marriage was over. I
was starting my own business. I had a mortgage to pay. I had a co-op. But I was
listening. I began to realize that if things were going to change, it had to
start with me.”

Q: Do you remember an a-ha moment?

A: I was still working three days a week at the company
while starting my business. I was asked to do something I wasn’t comfortable
with. I didn’t think it was ethical. I called a friend who was an accountant,
and he said, don’t do it. It was Friday. I left a note on my boss’ desk, saying
I can’t do this. When I came back the next week, I was fired. All of a sudden a
lot of my income was gone. I never saw it coming. I had no idea. That was a
real a-ha!

I was starting to integrate what I was hearing in Al-Anon –
say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t play games. Do the right thing. I
did it, and, whoa, I got fired.

I realized the power of being ethical in business. It was
scary. But it was also kind of cool. I was relieved to be out of there. In Al-Anon, you start learning to throw off all the lies and all the trappings, and
to be honest and be who you are. That was the beginning of it, and felt good.

“I realized the power of being ethical in business.
It was scary. But it was also kind of cool. I was relieved to be out of there.
In Al Anon, you start learning to throw off all the lies and all the trappings,
and to be honest and be who you are.”

Q: People could go several ways in that situation.
You could have said, “I did the right thing and it got me fired. I won’t do that again.”

A: That never occurred to me. I never questioned
whether I was doing the right thing. There was one thing I learned from my
mother. She never let anyone push her around. From a very early age, I would
never let anyone push me around.

There had been another, earlier incident. When I was on Wall
Street, I was asked to lie to my boss by one of his underlings. There was a big
political mess going on in my company at the time. I refused to do it. These corporate
types just went crazy. They couldn’t believe this secretary wouldn’t do this. I
was completely alienated and ostracized by the muckety-mucks.

Q: What was the difference between the two events?

A: The first time, the fact they asked me to do it just
frightened me. I thought, “Oh my God, I’m in one those Michael Douglas movies
about the Wall Street tycoon who’s trying to get everybody do something
illegal.” I had worked in Wall Street firms at the time when they were having
major scandals. I remember sitting next to a guy who was on the front page of
the paper the next day being taken out in handcuffs. I had seen that kind of stuff
happen, but I had never been asked to do anything.

Q: How did having a spiritual community make it
different the second time?

A: I wasn’t alone. I had a community, a group of people
who understood me. I could go to an Al-Anon meeting the next day and talk about
it. I had people who would support me. The first time, I didn’t have that. I couldn’t
go to anybody in the company and tell them. I didn’t have a 12-step group. I
could tell my husband, and he was sympathetic. He said you did the right thing.
But that was it.

Q: You’ve touched a number of times on doing the
right thing. How do you know what the right thing to do is?

A: I ask what my gut tells me. I also ask the Christian
question, what would Jesus do? It’s a cliché, but it works. And I try to think
about what I’m putting out. It’s a concept I learned early on in the 12-step
program: You get back what you put out. It’s the idea of karma. If I do the wrong
thing, it will come back to haunt me, in my soul.

“You get back what you put out. It’s the idea of
karma. If I do the wrong thing, it will come back to haunt me, in my soul.”

Q: Coming back to the present, what are the
connections between your work and spiritual life today?

A: Almost all of my clients are doing something that’s
making the world a better place. Most of them are in creative work. Their politics
and values are similar to mine. Most of them are spiritual. I can bring my
spirituality into the workplace very easily. I don’t have to worry like I did
when I was on Wall Street that I can’t go in and speak my mind and be honest
about how I feel about something.

We talk openly and honestly. When you’re dealing with money,
you have to be honest. I’ll force them to take an active role and pay attention
to their books. And I always set everything up so that if I walk out at
lunchtime and get hit by a bus they can go back in and figure out exactly what
I was doing. There are not going to be any mysteries.

That’s who I am. That’s bringing my spirituality into the
workplace. It’s all one now. I’m one person. I don’t have a work persona and a
non-work persona.

“It’s all one now. I’m one person. I don’t have a
work persona and a non-work persona.”

Q: How long after Al-Anon did other spiritual
activities come in?

A: I began feeling I wanted to start connecting to a
specifically spiritual community. I had been out of the church for 20 years. My
mother came up for Christmas, and said she’d really like to go to Christmas mass.
When we went in, I was just overwhelmed. They were singing Adeste Fidelis in the old Latin. I just started crying. It was such
a good feeling. I wanted to experience this all the time. So I started going back.
And it was great. I heard everything with different ears.

October 01, 2007

THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO HAS contacted me about Insight Trails’
interview with
Dads and Daughters (DADs) president and co-founder Joe Kelly, published on Sept. 10 (for more, see "Insight Trails Q&A: Joe Kelly").
It's
great to get
your feedback! The Q&A prompted a number
of questions from readers, so I scheduled a
follow-up interview with Joe. Here are
the
results.

Reader Question 1: “Would Joe be willing to talk more about
the effect of his alcoholism on his work? [Joe has been in recovery for 27 years.] How did he get from there to the
point where he was able to move forward with his life?”

Joe Kelly: When I was still drinking, my work life was
sporadic. It was rare for me to keep a job for more than six months. I dropped
out or flunked out of college five times. The notion that work would be a
source of ongoing fulfillment and challenge was really not on my radar screen.
I didn’t care about anything as much as I cared about drinking.

I always worked. I worked my way through high school. After
I left college, I worked a number of jobs. I worked in a clothing factory. I
drove a meat delivery truck. I worked in a juvenile home. I worked in traveling
repertory theater in Nebraska,
driving the truck, setting up and striking sets, doing bit parts as an actor. I
worked at a Catholic retreat house. But none of them lasted long.

"There was a lot of laughter
at [AA] meetings. It mystified me – what was up with these people? – and kept me
coming back."

I eventually got a job as a staff person in a battered women’s
shelter in Omaha.
God only knows how. Literally. I was very lucky. The shelter focused a lot on
looking at family systems and underlying issues like alcoholism. I became aware
of the alcoholism in my family tree. My supervisor, who herself was a recovering
alcoholic, nudged me to get an alcohol assessment.

When I was told I had a drinking problem, I panicked. I was
24½ years old. Nancy and I had just gotten married. We were pregnant. I was
terrified. I was also miserable. My tolerance had evaporated. Drinking was
making me anxious instead of giving me relief. What I was doing wasn’t working.

I went to see the priest who’d married us, and I just
spewed. “Oh, my God, I’m an alcoholic!” He listened patiently, and at the end, he
looked at me calmly and said, “Well, what are you going to do?” I said, “I
don’t know.” He said, “Is there anyone you can talk to?” The next day, I talked
with my supervisor. She took me to my first AA meeting. The meeting became my
home group.

It was quickly apparent the people in AA knew what I was going
through. Plus they were having a really good time. There was a lot of laughter
at meetings. It mystified me – what was up with these people? – and kept me
coming back. I started doing what they told me to do, and it worked. It wasn’t
easy. But my life started becoming more manageable. Life started making a lot
more sense.

I kept the job at the battered women’s shelter. The children
were born in August. Then when, they were 9 months old, we moved to Minneapolis and Nancy
opened the gallery. I worked almost three years at Roto-Rooter (see main
story, Sept. 10).

"Being an alcoholic or addict, you lose contact with who you
are. Sobriety doesn’t bring it back with a snap of the finger. It takes time."

Being an alcoholic or addict, you lose contact with who you
are. Sobriety doesn’t bring it back with a snap of the finger. It takes time. After
I’d been sober for four years or so, I started thinking about what I really
wanted to do. What kinds of things did I like? I remembered that when I was
growing up in New Jersey, I loved listening to
WOR radio from New York City, news and interviews all day long. And I loved listening to baseball games on
the radio. Brown Institute, a technical school for radio broadcasting, was nearby in Minneapolis.

I wanted to go right away but couldn’t. My lack
of patience was emblematic of my continuing immaturity. We had to rejigger our
schedules, and I had to get financial aid lined up. It took about four months,
but I finally got in. I found that journalism really suited my personality.
Interestingly, several years ago, going through my mother’s things, I found a
project I’d done from first grade. I’d glued the mastheads of The New York Times, The Herald Tribune, The
Star Ledger, The Journal American – the newspapers I grew up with – on
construction paper. Inside I’d written, “What I want to be when I grow up: I
want to be a reporter.” I have no memory of having created it. I didn’t go into
journalism until I was 30.

Reader question 2: "I'm interested in learning more about how Joe and his wife juggle the demands of family and creative life."

Joe Kelly: Ours was an unusual family. When the kids were 11, and we started New Moon, we included them in it. Because the girls were unschooling, they were fully involved. They were part of the creative process. As a result, we were able to live our lives together as a unit and share things in a lot of ways.

There were issues of balancing work and family, but, because New Moon was headquartered in our house, they weren't the same as some other families. There were some evenings, for instance, when the kids would be standing at the foot of the stairs shouting up to us in the attic, where Nancy and I would be finishing up something on the magazine, "Come down here and eat dinner!"

"Saying 'It's your turn,' has been less about keeping score and more
about encouraging the person to take risks, and expressing support for that risk-taking. It's saying, 'You do have the freedom to try this, and I'm willing to sacrifice for this cause.'"

Nancy and I have seldom kept score over whose turn it was to earn money. For nearly all our time together, we've both been working and earning money.

When it comes to the big things, we've said "it's your turn" to one another: me going to radio school after we'd moved to Minnesota for Nancy to start the gallery; Nancy starting New Moon after we'd moved the family twice for my radio jobs; me helping start DADs after she'd started New Moon.

I think, though, that saying "It's your turn," has been less about keeping score and more about encouraging the person to take risks, and expressing support for that risk-taking. It's saying, "You do have the freedom to try this, and I'm willing to sacrifice for this cause."

September 10, 2007

I FIRST MET JOE KELLY A DECADE AGO, WHEN he came to New York City for the
kickoff meeting of New Moon books.
With
him was a gaggle of 10- to 14-year-old girls
who had flown in from across the
country to be the editorial board for the books. Not a junior or advisory board
but the board,
responsible for deciding
the content, writing the books, and coaching each other through writer’s block
and the other obstacles that writers go through. Joe was there to encourage and
support.

It was a formula that Joe and his wife, Nancy Gruver, had
honed to great success with New Moon
magazine, the bimonthly publication by, for, and about girls that the couple founded in
1993. The publication, which Nancy continues to run, has won shelves full of awards and been a springboard for a
generation of girls to follow their dreams.

For the past eight years, Joe has advocated for girls on a
larger stage, as co-founder and president of Dads and Daughters (DADs), a
non-profit group dedicated to advocating for the importance of fathers in
daughters’ lives. He has written six books, including Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand, and Support Your
Daughter (Broadway/Random House, 2002) and The Dads and Daughters Togetherness Guide: 54 Fun Activities to Help
Build a Great Relationship (Broadway/Random House, 2007).

He has testified before Congress, been featured in The New York Times, People, and The Today Show, andtalked to hundreds of groups, from professional associations to local
parents groups, on issues from fathering, to Title IX, eating
disorders, and marketing to kids.
The Women’s Sports Foundation and iParenting.com
have named him “father of the year.”

I talked with Joe, an easy-to-smile 52 year old, about his
career path, the cues he has taken from his wife and twin daughters, and his
belief in the power of transformation, which he has experienced personally as a
recovering alcoholic with 27 years of sobriety.

Question: If you could go back to when you were 25 years old
and offer yourself a piece of advice, what would it be?

Answer: Be in your own life. Look for inspiration in your
own life. The things Nancy and I have done that look remarkable to the outside world all sprang out of our
own personal lives, loves, and concerns.

Insight: Look to your own life for inspiration. "The things Nancy and I have done that look remarkable to the outside world all sprang out of our
own personal lives, loves, and concerns."

Q: Would the Joe Kelly of 25-30 years ago be surprised at
where you are today?

A: Very surprised. If someone had said to me in my first
year of sobriety,
“Sit down and make a list of all the things you dream of
doing with your life,” that list would be so pathetic compared to what has
actually happened. My imagination, my sense of what’s possible, and my sense of
my own capabilities were all so stunted.

Q: What would have been on your list?

A: Hold a steady job. Provide for my family. Be a marginal
husband. That would have been about it. If someone had really pushed me and
asked, “What is the most wild and outrageous thing you could do?”
what probably
would have come up is a dream I had when I was nine or ten years old to write a
book. I would have had no idea what it would have been about, though.

Q: What happened to shift things in your life?

A: Sobriety, and by sobriety I don’t mean just not drinking,
but continuous engagement in growing
spiritually, emotionally, psychologically,
socially. That and having children, and having female children,
and two at
once!

A lot of the shifts in my life, though, can be traced to stupidity
(laughs) – being young and naïve and stupid enough to take risks.

Insight: Be open to taking risks. "A lot of the shifts in my life can be traced to...being young and naïve and stupid enough to take risks."

Q: What do you mean?

A: In 1981, we moved from Omaha, Nebraska,
to the Twin Cities, so that Nancy and a woman she had been working with could
open a contemporary American crafts gallery. It was, on the surface, an
incredibly stupid thing to do. We had nine-month-old twins. In four years, the
business never paid Nancy
a dime. We kept moving from apartment to apartment because we couldn’t afford
the rent. I got a job dispatching trucks for Roto Rooter for our steady income.

About four years later, after the gallery had closed, I
decided to enroll in a radio and TV broadcasting program at a for-profit tech
school in the Twin Cities. I thought I could get a job doing play-by-play for a
Major League Baseball team (another bit of naivete!). I got a job at a
hole-in-the-wall breakfast diner, and worked a couple of hours in the morning
before school. On the weekend, I delivered newspapers.

In the course of the program, though, I landed an internship
at a radio newsroom. I
learned how to call people up, interview them, and write
copy, and found I was good at it. While I was still in school, I got hired to
be the news director for a radio station in Marshall, a small farming town in
southwestern Minnesota.

So we packed up and moved again. We didn’t know anybody
there. We knew nothingabout farming.
We’d both grown up in the suburbs. It was 1985. Agriculture was in the midst of
a massive catastrophe, and my job was to report on it.

But I learned on the job. I got to be good at it. It was a
big adventure. My stories got picked up.
I won awards. I ended up being
president of the Minnesota Advisory Board for United Press International.

Out of that experience, I was hired by Minnesota Public
Radio to work in Duluth.
Once again, we knew nobody there. We just packed up and went. Nancy got a really good job with a multi-county government agency, starting a pilot
program to provide health insurance for the working poor – which she got, in
part, because of the job she had found in Marshall
being business manager of a hospice.

In retrospect, we took a lot of stupid leaps not fully
realizing how stupid they were. But they worked out. It was the same thing with
the magazine. We were too dumb to know it was dumb to do.

Q: How so?

A: We had no experience in magazines. I had experience in
journalism, but it was in radio, not print. Serendipitously, the style of
writing for radio and the style of writing for children are very similar.
Writing for radio is all in active voice. It’s all short sentences, one thought
per sentence. And that’s how you write for children. I didn’t know this at the
time, but it worked out perfectly.

Insight: Be open to serendipity. "The style of
writing for radio and the style of writing for children are very similar. I didn’t know this at the
time, but it worked out perfectly."

The idea for the magazine occurred to Nancy literally out of the blue. We had been
working in our jobs for about five years, and were getting bored. I started
working part-time to spend more time with our kids. Nancy applied for a fellowship to the Kennedy School in Boston to learn more about public health
policy. She was a finalist. But she didn’t get it, and she was crushed.

It became a crisis moment for her: “What do I really want to
do?” She knew she’d be passionate about working on girls’ or women’s issues,
but had no idea what or how to get there. So the two of us went off for a
weekend to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to figure out what we were going to
do with our lives. Of course, when we got there, we never talked about it. We
read books the whole weekend.

Finally, on the way home, driving through the Upper
Peninsula – this beautiful, desolate landscape – Nancy turned to me and said, “How about a
Junior Ms.?” I said, “What?” And she
said, “How about a magazine for girls that girls would run?” She says now that
the idea just snapped into her head, fully
formed. She knew she was going to do
it. It was going to happen.

When we got home, we sat down and talked with the girls, who
were 11 at the time (they are now in their late 20s). Their response was,
“You’re crazy. You don’t know anything about magazines.” And Nancy said, “Well, OK. We know that. But
let’s say we could figure out that part. Would you be interested?” And we all
stayed up until 1 o’clock in the morning talking about what it would look like.

Literally nine months later, the first issue came out.

Q: This was Nancy’s
idea. Why did you get involved?

A: We had talked for some time about wanting to work
together. We thought it would be fun to do. Nancy had done a lot of interesting work.
She’d owned her own business, and, through the agency work, had made an impact
in our community. She’s creative. I’m good at envisioning the next step, and
how to get there. And I had experience in journalism. We were both concerned
about the girls, and sexism, and the world the girls were growing up in. We
didn’t know what the idea was going to become. We just thought it was a good
idea, and the girls and their friends and the mothers of their friends thought
it was a good idea.

As I look back on my work life, in nearly all of the cases,
the jobs I’ve taken and careers I’ve had have been presented to me. They came along and I was ready. I’ve sometimes
longed to be the kind of person who plans ahead and plots things out, and
decides with certainty that this is
the work they want to do for the rest of their life. But that’s not how my life
has worked. Experience has shown me that good things will come along in life,
and I have faith they will.

Insight: Have faith. "Experience has shown me that good things will come along in life."

Q: When did you start pulling back from your jobs?

A: I quit my job first, before the first issue came out. I had
written a press release on New Moon and
sent it out to a bunch of newspapers. A reporter from the Duluth newspaper followed up and did a feature
story on the magazine and its process. The story got picked up by
Knight-Ridder’s news service and ran in newspapers across the country. Our
phone started ringing off the hook. We had hundreds of people subscribing
before we’d even printed the first issue.

So I left my job and started answering the phone and
entering subscriptions. Nancy kept working awhile longer because she was making more money. We refinanced our house and
took out $10,000. Things mostly fell into place.

Q: Was there an a-ha moment, when you realized “we can do
this”?

A: Not exactly. We did things instinctively. We were
presumptuous. We had faith. Looking back, a lot of things converged to help us.
And not just the successes. Nancy starting the craft gallery, and having it fail, was an important learning
experience. It gave her
concrete experience in how to manage a business. It also taught her the most
important lesson for entrepreneurs: you have to be able to pay yourself. You
can have a great idea, but it’s not good enough if it can’t support you.

The way we ran the magazine, with the adults creating a
space for the kids to exercise their own powers, was something we learned from
unschooling our children. That also was risky – in unschooling, kids set their
own path – but it worked.

Q: Was there fear?

A: Mostly fear about money. We still are fearful about
scarcity. We have always been frugal. Since the first loan, New Moon has never taken out a loan. It's cash-flowed everything it’s done. We didn’t want to be beholden to anyone.

Q: What was it like to work with your wife?

A: It was a lot of fun. But it could also be a source of
tension. We had to work really hard at separating our work life and our home
life. That meant not investing a work disagreement with the baggage of our home life. We had to learn that, when we disagree about a color to use in
the magazine, there’s a fairly decent possibility we’re just disagreeing about
the color. It’s not just one more example that Nancy thinks I’m a blithering idiot. She may really
think green is better.

It still happens when we work together, but I think we’re
better at surfacing the tension more quickly. One of us will recognize right
away, “This is about something else,” and pierce it, or back off, until we can
sit down and talk about what’s really bothering us.

Q: How have you applied the lessons you’ve learned in your
current job with Dads & Daughters?

A: A lot of what underlies my work is questioning the way
things are. It’s the journalistic instinct. I think it’s especially true for
people who have gone through life-or-death transformations like getting sober.
You realize it’s possible for things to be radically changed.

Insight: Change is possible. "[When you've been] through a life-or-death transformation, you realize it's possible for things to be radically changed."

A: There are a lot of ads out there that celebrate qualities
you don’t want to see in kids. What we’ve tried to do is track down the head of
the companies – many of whom are men and fathers – and ask them to re-imagine
the ads’ messages as something they would say to their daughters. It’s making
the personal political.

If you put it in this context, an ad that says, “4 out of 5
girls you hate ask for it by name. Stop hating them. Starting being them” – a
real ad, by the way, for a hair product – is absurd. You wouldn’t teach your
daughter to hate other people, or to become like the people they hate.

In that case, the company’s first response, from the
marketing director, was to ignore us. But then we got a personal letter from
the CEO. He said he’d been on vacation with his children when our letter
arrived. He went on to say that when he got back, he called together his team
and told them pull the ads and “never to do anything like that again.”

A lot of times, when we send letters to companies, we get no
response. But almost all the time, when we can engage companies in conversation,
they do what we ask.

Insight: Connect. "What I enjoy most is helping people understand how important
the father-daughter relationship is, and inspiring them to do something about it."

Q: You also focus energy on education.

A: In a sense, my role is to be the “spokesdad.” The core of
that is working to raise the profile of father-daughter relationships, to
inspire fathers and stepfathers to get more involved in their daughters’ lives,
and to give them tools to be better fathers. Fathers and stepfathers have an
incredible influence in their daughters’ lives. Too many don’t realize it, and
the culture doesn’t acknowledge it.

What I enjoy most is helping people understand how important
the father-daughter relationship is, and inspiring them to do something about it. Sometimes
that just means creating a space for dads to think and talk. When I go out to a
school and speak about fathering to a room of 200 fathers, the thing that
happens that makes a real difference is when those 200 guys sitting in the room
look around and say, “There’s 199 other guys here who feel this is important.
I’m not alone.” It’s an inspiring experience.
It certainly inspires me.

That's "It"

****

Resources for going further:

For more on Dads & Daughters, including tips for fathering
daughters and ways to get involved, see www.dadsanddaughters.org .

To learn more about Joe's new book The Dads and Daughters Togetherness Guide: 54 Fun Activities to Help
Build a Great Relationship, and buy a copy, go to www.amazon.com.

To learn more about his book Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand, and Support Your
Daughter When She's Growing Up So Fast, go to www.amazon.com .

For more about New
Moon magazine, or start a subscription, go to www.newmoon.org .

For more on unschooling, see The Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn, at www.amazon.com , or John C.
Holt’s web site, or visit the web site www.unschooling.com .